A recent Professional Planner article, “For serious results, make risk profiling a game”, left me pondering the value of client profiling in marketing. Many businesses are attempting to profile their clients to help them more ably recognise their buying motivations.
Client personas
A ‘client persona’ is the conventional tool to help businesses profile their customers. I should emphasise that a client persona tool won’t match your business to every client. Rather, it will help you focus on matching your offerings with an “ideal client” segment. Take the Millennial demographic, born roughly between 1980 and 2000, and who are frequently said to be thoroughly absorbed with living life in the present. Who isn’t at 17? Moreover, you don’t need to be the next Ray Kroc to know that selling Millennials estate management or retirement planning services won’t cut the mustard.
That said, your ideal Millennial client may sit a little outside the demographic box. They might be 30-somethings, living within cooee of a capital city CBD, are working in professional jobs or own a business. Most probably, they’ll have higher living costs and, with it, more financial pressures. As a consequence, they are more likely to need financial advice to maintain their lifestyle requirements.
This is only one example of a customer persona, of course, but the idea is to look for the characteristics of your ideal client. At the end of the process, you should be able to build a picture of the client, what interests them financially, what motivates their purchasing behaviour and choices.
How do you build a client persona?
My advice is to rally the people in your firm who work closely with your clients. In other words, those people functioning at the coalface, such as your sales team. It’s free market intelligence and it’s an exercise that can reveal the core characteristics of your clients – and their common needs.
If you’re serious about customer profiling strategies, consider contacting a marketing consultant for help. Running a facilitated session to build customer personas is normally a valuable investment. You’ll often find that your team has all the answers. However, an outside consultant can help extract the information in a way that makes sense, works within your business strategy, and helps drive leads and revenue to your business.
Does building customer personas work?
Building customer personas won’t work in isolation. It must be part of your overall marketing strategy, which helps you focus more closely on your client and their motivations. It challenges you to consider what drives a client to make a purchase from your business. Why not give it a go? You’re sure to draw some benefit from the exercise, which justifies the time you invest.
